Community · 8 Sep 2026

What Japanese players can read that you cannot

A volunteer group has posted a metagame graph of ranked play every single day since 2020, built from several hundred recorded matches. There is a tier list updated two or three times a week, tournament data credited to organisers, and long-form strategy essays.

None of it exists in English. Not because nobody has translated it, but because the volume is not translatable by one person. Here is what is actually out there — and what its authors do and do not allow.

BEANS

Environment survey reports · daily beans-duelplays.com · since 2020

Three reports a day: New Division ranked, All Division ranked, and sanctioned tournaments. Published at 18:30 JST, deliberately ahead of their own social posts. Roughly four thousand articles in the archive.

The data is a graph of what decks were encountered in ranked play, compiled from several hundred matches per day by the group's members. It also tracks the Legend rank cutoff.

The founder's statement describes how it started, and the scale-up is the part worth reading:

Before we formed, I was posting about fifteen matches a day — just the decks I happened to run into. Looking at the graphs now, built from several hundred matches every day, I sometimes feel quite moved by it. 発足前は私が1人でその日にマッチしたデッキを15戦程載せていただけなので、数百戦も毎日集計できている今のグラフを見ると、時に感慨深い気持ちになります。 BEANS founding statement, April 2022 — translated

Fifteen matches by one person, to several hundred by a group, sustained for six years. The stated motivation is not analytical:

We are, in short, a group of people who love this game. We want the service to run forever, and we want to share how much fun it is. 要はデュエプレが大好きな集団です。デュエプレのサービスが永遠に続いてほしく、皆でこの楽しさを共有したいと思っています。 Same statement — translated

Kamigame

Tier lists, deck guides, event coverage kamigame.jp · official partnership with Takara Tomy

Separate tier lists for New Division and All Division, updated two or three times a week, with movement arrows, build cost and difficulty ratings per deck. Also carries tournament metagame breakdowns credited to the organisers who supply them.

The tier placements are editorial judgement, and the site says so on the page. Their usage data comes from an editor playing the ladder and recording opponents — around a hundred games at a time, a smaller sample than BEANS runs but with commentary attached.

Individual writers

Long-form strategy, on note.com and personal blogs Independent · irregular

This is where the actual theory lives. Pieces on why players decline to attack, on how mana charging decisions work, on the specific ways the digital game's rules differ from paper. Some run to several thousand words.

Two articles on this site are built on them, with attribution — why nobody attacks and how mana works.

And one place this site will not go

Duel Masters PLAY'S has a long-running discussion thread on Japanese message boards — currently past its seven hundredth instalment. It is the closest thing the game has to a rolling conversation, and it is deliberately unavailable.

The thread has moved hosts more than once. The stated reason, from the migration notice:

It came to light that an aggregator republishing this thread was making tens of thousands of yen a month, and more people no longer wanted their own posts used to make somebody money. 本スレをまとめてるアフィカスが月に数万円も稼いでいる事が判明し、自分の書き込みを金稼ぎに使われたくないという人たちが増えたからです。 Thread migration notice — translated

They chose the new host partly because its administrator would act on takedown requests against republishers. These people moved their entire forum to stop being aggregated.

So it is off limits here This site earns nothing, which removes the money objection but not the underlying one: people posting anonymously to a board that migrated specifically to avoid republication have not consented to being collected, translated and put somewhere else. Their reason for objecting does not stop applying because the person copying them is not being paid.

Public posts on X are a different situation — posted under a handle, to an open timeline, by someone who chose that. Even there, this site reports volume and paraphrases rather than reproducing.

The asymmetry, stated plainly

~4,000

Articles in one volunteer group's archive, one game, six years, Japanese only

Set against that: an English-language wiki that documents cards but not formats, a subreddit of a few hundred where the recent posts are about login errors and how mana works, and a Discord where the useful information scrolls past and cannot be searched from outside.

The gap is not a translation gap. It is a volume gap. One person translating full-time could not keep up with BEANS alone, and BEANS is one source of several. What can be done is narrower: pick the things that do not go stale, explain the structure rather than the daily state, and point at the originals for everything else.

That is what this site is trying to be. It is not a substitute for any of the above and it does not want to be one.

Where to start, if you read some Japanese

For	Go to
What people are actually playing today	BEANS daily reports
Which decks are considered strong, and why	Kamigame tier lists
Tournament results and metagame breakdowns	Kamigame, credited to organisers
Strategy and theory	note.com, individual writers
Card rulings	Official comprehensive rules PDF; the ones that catch people out

Machine translation handles most of these adequately. The card names will come out mangled — the glossary covers the terms that break.

Sources

BEANS founding statement, published April 2022, revised January 2023. Quotations translated; the Japanese is given alongside. Publication cadence and archive size observed from the site itself, September 2026.
Kamigame's editorial disclaimer appears on its own tier list pages.
Thread migration notice, quoted from the board's own header. Translated; no thread content is reproduced and no thread is linked.

Everything quoted here is a public statement of intent by the people who wrote it, given with attribution. Where a source has asked not to be republished, it is described rather than used.